There hadn’t been some dramatic dénouement to signal the end of my days as I knew them - it was much more of a slow encroachment of dark grey clouds. Six months’ worth of nearly a year, actually, and my life had more or less turned into a machine with sand poured directly into its gears. That razor-sharp creativity that used to define and drive my life had dulled to lead. I found myself sitting at my desk, hands poised to create, only to realize that all my thoughts were circling around the same tired anxieties and uncharacteristic pessimism. Moreover, too many bad things were happening to me: daily!

I didn’t have medical depression or something with a Latin name that some qualified professional would determine upon examining my karmic fingerprint. But there was this grey wetness, this specific condensation, that seemed to have taken up residence in my skull, whispering a litany of self-denigration at whatever it was I was trying to accomplish: or even to finish.

It was an unwelcome addition, a parasitic leech that had insinuated itself into my system and was now happily suckling at my ambition. My routines. I felt all my edges were slipping, my results were all over the place and mostly negative, and I was generally dissolving from the inside out.

With no real treatment options available to me, I set off for the rez, where I was raised - where my mother resides with the Cree Nation. My mother and I don’t get along very well, but I remember where home is.

It was not some magical landscape of plastic dreamcatchers and peace pipes sold to tourists by the nearest vendor; the man to whom I made my appointment lived in a small concrete block of a house strewn with the smells of rust, pine resin, and old wool. There was shite all over the lawn. He was taciturn, with a face etched into creases from years of sun and cold, and his discipline was vast and intimidating and perhaps vanishing.

When I arrived, tired from a long night’s drive and the prospect of my impending discussion, he didn’t ask me how I was feeling or what was bothering me. There was no need, apparently, for niceties. He gestured for me to have a seat at his sturdy pine table and fixed me with a long, assessing stare before leaving the room.

When he returned, he carried a small mortar and pestle made of dark basalt and two tiny purses of dried buckskin, fastened with braided sinew. He said nothing as he unfastened the bags and dumped a pile of pale, fibrous tan material and some dark charcoal-like powder into the mortar, poking at it with the pestle. I know that I know little about the specifics, but I know that he would be the only one to help me now, or I could trust to help me.

“The people of your world think that to heal is to make things all better,” said Maski, the local shaman, in a tone as flat as his surroundings, lacking any trace of flourish. “They want a pill that will knock you out so that you wake up cured, to continue living as before, but what is in there inside you is not an illness. It is an occupant. It has made your house its own, turned it upside down to make itself comfortable. I saw it when you entered.”

He paused in his ministrations and looked up at me with eyes like flint. Then he handed me the mortar with a nod. I looked at the dry mass in it, expecting some kind of sweet, spicy herbal medley, but instead, my nostrils flared at the sudden onslaught of harsh, alkaline, and primal scent that assailed them. It was the smell of frozen earth under a dead forest.

“This is the inner bark of the red willow, mixed with the root of the mountain alum,” said Maski, gesturing at the pile. “The willow swallows the winds; the alum, in turn, drinks in the hills’ iron. Together, they are an astringent - they suck the water out of things, dry them up and shrivel them until there is nothing left for a stranger to hide in.” I was just looking forward to washing it all down with a ‘Voodoo’ beer I stockpiled in my trunk.

He told me to take a pinch of the mixture and let it fall onto my tongue, instructing me not to swallow but to hold it there. I couldn’t move at first because the dry powder was so bitter, so unexpectedly so. It was a sharp, almost electric sourness that made my eyes water and my throat convulse; in fact, it was as if all the moisture in my mouth had been sucked out at once. My tongue felt hot and swollen, and the unpleasant sensation spread to my throat and down my spine like a visceral tidal wave. I had heartburn, a splitting headache, and stomach cramps all at once.

And then the unwelcome parasite that had taken up residence in my person for the past few months reacted, in the most unpleasant way possible.

It had, until recently, manifested itself as a dull, insipid pressure in my chest, but the violent reaction to the bitter powder had sent it into a screeching rage. A sharp, frigid shudder of something akin to fear shot through me, though it was not mine - or rather, not wholly mine. My lungs constricted, refusing to let any air in even as my ribs pushed in and out in a desperate bid to do so. My collarbones dug into my shoulders as I fought against this new, terrible sensation, feeling the cold fingers of its tendrils snake into my flesh, trying to burrow deeper into my very spine.

“Be still,” said Maski, his voice somehow steady, keeping me grounded as the room seemed to tilt. “Do not swallow. Let the medicine hunt. It is turning your flesh to shattered glass. Let it burn.”

And, burn it did.

And so I did. I held the acrid, terrible dust on my tongue for ten minutes - or perhaps longer, it felt much longer - as my body shook from the violent purge that was to come. All the while, I watched the motes of dust hover in the slanting light pouring in from the window. The unwelcome ghost that had possessed me was no longer a voice in head but something more tangible, something that fought as I fought, that trembled and recoiled as I did. It was a part of me, but no longer in a good way, for both of us!

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NÔHCI NÎSO

Boiling Bitter Water

_______________________

Nights on the rez are typically not for sleeping. It reminds me of NYC, without the concrete, skyscrapers, and population. It’s hard to explain. I visit so rarely friends are not an option anymore. Outside Maski’s humble abode it was blowing pretty hard, and it was definitely looking to rain. Hard. Shadows, that seemed like little people, flickered and danced from the cast-iron stove, as the wreaths of the smoke climbed and clung to the walls, devouring the room.

Maski sat on the low wooden stool, his knees crossed, his face was not the usual mask of clownish mysticism depicted in native legends. Instead, it was carved with lines of experience, and had an air of competence, as if he had seen every winter in Eeyou Istchee, and too many things most naked eyes refuse, or could never understand.

I couldn’t help but put my faith in him, regardless of the consequences. A choice I made before the long drive. And there was no reason to question my decision.

“ . . . môniyâwak see the forest, and they see furniture, paper products,” said Maski; the words seemed to ooze from him, like the wind. Maski regularly spoke a language that was vaguely familiar to me now. He knew it immediately and resorted to broken English first we met. “They see the plants and they call them weeds to be cut or poisoned… but they have forgotten that long before the wemistikosiu brought his iron and his Bibles, the maskihkîhkân was gifted to us by their spirit. When the First People walked this land, the plants took pity on the poor two-legged and agreed to heal them, so long as they remembered to always ask permission.” He reached into a canvas bag and produced a bundle of dried, dark-purple roots, wîhkês I think he called them. “These roots grow in the mucky banks of the river before the big freeze.”

Plants asking for anything is definitely beyond my wheelhouse, I am a programmer, not least of which agnostic. And, plants don’t say shite to me.

“My grandfather used this root to clean his people,” said Maski, dropping the wîhkês in the iron pot, which hissed and spat in reply. The water in the pot turned instantly to black and greasy liquid, as if bruised. “When the fever raged and the smallpox came in with the white people, the iyiniw alone survived, for the wîhkês root knows how to expel what is unwanted in the body.” Maski took up a peeled willow twig that looked like a witch’s wand and drew slow, wide circles round and round, several times counterclockwise, until the surface of the water was like glass. “The grey powder that I gave you was the lock. It closed the doors within your ribs, so anything in your lungs would not escape further into your bone. But now, the tea is the wash. You see, it is going to flood the room.”

“Flood . . . . ummmm, my room?” My thumb pointing at myself.

Honestly, I thought the job was D-O-N-E with the horrid powder, and I was about to express my deep gratitude, a shove off. I knew a depanneur close by, and it was closing soon, and a bottle of wine to wash everything down would hit the spot.

Maski poured some of the tea in a dented tin cup. It smelled strongly of copper and something else entirely that made my nose run. He gave the cup to me, our fingers brushing, his eyes wide a black as charcoal.

“Are you sure?” I have had my share of drugs—a large share— and my share of hallucinations, and I reminded myself this couldn’t be any worse.

Could it?

The thought of “better” than any past experiences was the furthest word from my mind.

“Drink,” he said firmly but gently, grounding me. “Drink it all, my friend.” I drank the tea slowly, and the vile copper taste clung to my tongue as I fought to swallow it. I reminded myself over and over again, this is a one-time thing. It did however make me more comfortable that he called me a friend.

I clung to that word, “friend.”

“Kool,” I thought, he likes me.

There was dead silence in the room between us for twenty minutes. Maski then told me to lay back on the canvas cot at the far end of the room as he pulled a thick homemade wool blanket over me. “You are going to feel very poorly very soon,” he said, shoving the low wood stool at the end of the cot. “Do not fear the heat, my brother. Let it consume you.”

It was summer. I feared the heat.

Immediately, I barked what always comes to mind in instances I am about to have a tooth pulled, “OYE!” My usual brand of clever humour was failing me, but I say it often enough in situations like this. The word “poorly” resonated now, but in a Manchester dialect that reminded me of nights knocking back an edible and binge-watching BBC crime dramas at home. “Poooorly,” I kept repeating to myself.

By midnight, the wind from the forest had stopped. The room was unnervingly different. More silent than ever.

And then.

The fever - let’s call it that for simplicity’s sake - began.

It began in my gut, like a wrung-out rag being twisted tighter and tighter around my spine, but it was not long before it claimed the rest of me. My skin was on fire, and my sweat was ice as it ran down my sides, soaking into the canvas cot, my shirt, and the wool blanket. I looked up and saw the ceiling stretched out before me, impossibly far, like a starless sky. The room was stifling, and the air smelled strongly of damp earth. My usual white face paint, days old, was melting off my face. I kicked the blanket off, and two seconds later searched desperately for it again.

Kicked it off and searched.

Again. And again. And . . .

And then, in my gut, I felt it. Not the fever, but something else, something alien. It was like a mass of tentacles was writhing around in there, trying to find purchase, with a thousand needles trying to crawl up my throat and out my mouth. It pushed and shoved, trying to force its way up, but it could only manage to get to my windpipe and constrict it, smothering me. I was choking on the stench of old woodsmoke, but the smog in my lungs refused to give way. My heart was pounding like it wanted to beat right out of my chest.

I deeply regretted believing - or misbelieving - I had a problem at all! What was I thinking!

Failures… My failures whispered to me in the dark. The ghost of the last six months’ failures, regrets, guilt-ridden nights, and selfish mornings joined in a chorus of hate inside my skull. I looked down and saw that my hands were withered, my fingers seemed elongated, and grey, my skin looked old, and I could feel my hair and eyelids. Something was feeding on the bile of shame and self-loathing, trying to force me to vomit up the bitter root and wash the taste of failure from my mouth. It was trying to rip me from the inside out, make me spill my guts on the hardwood floor.

“Stay in the fever,” Maski exclaimed!

Maski’s voice was a shout in my ear, and it took me several heartbeats to realize that it was not a dream. A hallucination? What was it? When I finally managed to squeeze my eyes open, the stool by my bed was empty; Maski was standing over me, his face lit by the embers in the stove, his hands gripping my shoulders, keeping me from bucking on the floor.

“Don’t vomit! Stay in the fever!” he shouted as he gripped my shoulders tightly. “It is gasping because it is drowning! The root is tearing its grip off your blood!” I gripped the steel rails of the cot so hard that my knuckles were whiter than the decaying walls. My heart thundered against my ribs, my body, my spirit, my soul - fighting against a battle that threatened to spill into eternity - or, at least, that was my overwhelming feeling at that moment.

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piskêtasinihikun nisto

Phantom Residue

________________________

It wasn’t until the sun finally came up that my cold sweat and minor migraine broke. All that remained was a lightheaded emptiness; I was depleted, tapped-fucking-out. Best described as a hangover, however unique in its own way. Needless to say, Maski refused to let me rest. Which, of course, came as no surprise.

One has to understand how the Cree view existence itself. In Western thought, a human being is an isolated observer in a world of inert objects—trees are timber, swamps are waste, and plants are mere chemical bundles waiting to be exploited and even pharmaceutical’d - all for profit of course. But in the nêhiyaw worldview, every root, or river, even the wind is a relative. There is no boundary between the human and the non-human world, only a chaotic web of ongoing relationships. Medicine, or maskihkîhkân, is not a substance you consume to force a symptom into submission; it is an act of diplomacy. It is an agreement struck between a human being and the spirit-intelligence of a plant species that has inhabited this continent for a millennia longer than our fragile, and most often corrupt, institutions. Suffice it to say, the only drugs I have ever taken are far too many pain killers, and a wheelbarrow of party drugs [you can make up your own mind about that, it is what it is].

I am only one quarter Cree on my mother’s side (perhaps more, I have never done a DNA analysis). But I have always felt a stronger connection to the reservation than I have my family, or parents themselves more succinctly. That is what drove me back to it for answers in the first place. I always felt the place itself was more ‘home’ to me that my father who raised me, and my mother who had many personal struggles of her own. Addiction is in all our chemistry. I feel lucky I understood that early.

“You believe yourself living in a closed box, where everything inside is just you and your mind,” Maski said as he watched me stumble about with irritable fatigue and a yearning for one of those pain killers. “That is the white man sickness. It is an illusion. A solitary room. You think your dark thoughts are generated by your own brain, that your stagnation belongs entirely to you. Step outside, and you’ll realize the world is full of eyes. Nature knows who belongs and who doesn’t. Sickness is merely an uninvited guest taking advantage of an unbolted door. You came here for a reason.”

That I did.

He guided me to place where my bare feet sank into the damp, swampy earth beside the cabin. Muck. The cold soggy feel sent an instant, sobering shock through the soles of my feet to the base of my skull. I am more comfortable in shoes boots to be honest. Then Maski kneeled, plunged his hand deep into the mud, and spoke—not in chant or dramatic declaration, but quietly, in his native tongue. Later, he told me he was introducing the earth to us. To me, and to my illness, asking the land to accept what I could no longer carry. The very ghost from within still too hard to fully explain, and maybe beyond any ability to understand. I just knew it was there.

In Cree tradition, to take from the earth requires an offering of tobacco—cîstêmâw—and a clear statement of intent. Maski wasn’t commanding the land; he was negotiating with it, invoking an ancient treaty between his people and the maskek—the peat bogs that cloak the boreal north. The maskek is a realm of deep preservation and patient decay. It holds dead things for thousands of years without rotting; it absorbs, filters, and neutralizes toxicity. He was asking our environment to act as a sink for what I felt was consuming me: The very thing that might spare me (a personal problem of one, I certainly get that), governments couldn’t care less to destroy —as they do ordinary lives.

The climax of the ritual was devoid of theatrical flair. No flashing lights, no dramatic apparitions. No actual ghosts. Indigenous medicine is quiet, heavy, and as unglamorous as my unproven condition. It dispenses with spectacle because real power has nothing to prove. Everything I shared could be entirely in my head, and my head alone.

Maski handed me a dull bone knife and pointed to a dark patch of saturated mud where water pooled beneath the surface. “Dig,” he commanded.

“Oye,” I mustered under my breath, but Maski heard me, I am almost sure.

I dropped to my knees and tore into the earth. My fingers grew numb against the cold, but the physical strain quieted my mind. I was happy my migraine was gone because they can be debilitating. Digging into the maskek feels like cutting into living flesh—it is dense, fibrous, and saturated with dark water that smells of ancient cold and mineral iron. Roots feel to me like veins.

When the hole reached the stagnant water beneath, Maski stood behind me and placed a heavy, calloused hand on the back of my neck. His grip felt like an immovable anchor.

“It has nowhere left to go,” he said quietly into the back of my head. “The plants have made your inside bitter. The air here is awake. The entity cannot hold to a host that has reconnected with the ground. Breathe in the air and give it back.”

I closed my eyes and drew a long, jagged breath. The sharp northern air filled my lungs, and I exhaled slowly over the open pit. A deep, agonizing tearing sensation pulled behind my chest like a stubborn root torn violently from wet muck.

With a dry, writhing convulsion in my throat, I leaned over the dark water and spat out a thick, bitter fluid mixed with the remnants of charcoal ash. Whether it was the bitter brew I had swallowed the night before or something far older, I did not know. Like I had smoked one too many cigarettes the night before and hacked up used Camels and regurgitated bourbon is how I might describe it from past experience.

It was over in seconds.

The return of my clarity was immediate, yet completely unromantic. Quite boring actually. The least interesting part of this story.

When I returned home several days later, I couldn’t be sure if whatever crippled my mind for many months had lifted. My focus ‘seemed’ sharper, and the decisions that once paralyzed me were resolved with less hesitation. More importantly, my creative current was moving again, more fluid and precise.

Yet the medicine had not made me invincible; it had made me awake. Perhaps? It is somewhat like my experiences with ayahuasca or DMT . . . a story for another time. I feel as though fewer bad things are happening to me, but I cannot be sure that would not have happened in time anyway. Afterall, life is a series of ups and downs.

Cree elders often say that health is not a permanent state to achieve and lock away; it is a continuous posture of balance—miyo-wicêhtowin. A body that becomes complacent or isolated turns to stagnant water once more.

A mind too!

Every few weeks, usually late in the afternoon when creative exhaustion sets in, I feel it: a faint, cool phantom pressure just behind my eyes. Inside my head. A quiet, echoing memory testing the perimeter, checking to see if my mind has grown stagnant again. I guess it is really the memory that something happened beyond my ability to understand that lay deep within my mother’s traditions. And now, an experience of my own.

I learned the ultimate lesson of the maskek: the door is never fully locked. The world is full of displaced things seeking an unanchored host. The ghost returns if the internal climate sours—if I slip back into self-doubt, isolation, and spiritual neglect.

Living is no longer a matter of passive comfort; it is an active discipline. Whenever the air around me begins to feel heavy, I recall the bitter taste of red willow, the scent of boiling rat-root over hardwood, and the cold, unyielding earth of the Cree borderlands. I keep the soil of my body inhospitable, sharp, and clear.

For now, anyway. Everything dissipates eventually. But, when things start to seem beyond my control, I have a foundation or experience I can rely on to center me and bring me back to a sort of equilibrium.

I don’t often write about myself. Rarely in fact, very intentionally. I prefer to write in the 3rd person. Any 1st person stories I prefer to tell performatively one way or another. But other than memories of drinking, doing drugs, and conniving, this is the first experience I can remember with and where the people I grew up with had a positive effect on my overall mental disposition. Aside from the fact that where and how we are raised always seems to be a big part of who we are, it had taken until this time to understand more about myself than I thought I was capable of, having buried most of my past where I felt it belonged.

In the dirt.

The End. And, not the end . . .

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